High drama as Jan. 6 hearing details Trump's effort to corrupt Justice Department

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., played previous video testimony ahead of questioning live witnesses to preview how the committee would reveal findings from what took place inside a heated Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, 2021, between Trump and top Justice Department officials.

"The meeting took about another two and a half hours from the time I entered. It was entirely focused on whether there should be a DOJ leadership change," former deputy acting attorney general Richard Donoghue recalled in taped testimony. "I would say, directly in front of the president, Jeff Rosen was to my right. Jeff Clark was to my left."

"He looked at me and he underscored," said former acting attorney general Jeff Rosen, "'Well the one thing we know is you're not gonna do anything, you don’t even agree that the concerns that are being presented are valid. And here is someone who has a different view, so, why shouldn't I do that, you know?' That's how the discussion went, proceeded."

Former White House attorney Eric Herschmann underscored the purpose of the meeting, where "Jeff Clark was proposing that Jeff Rosen be replaced by Jeff Clark -- and I thought the proposal was asinine."

Donoghue recalled that Clark "repeatedly said to the president that if he was put in the seat, he would conduct real investigations that would, in his view, uncover widespread fraud."

Former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen told the committee that Trump made several requests to the Department of Justice after Bill Barr left his position in December 2020.

According to Rosen, Trump called him "virtually every day" between December 23 and January 3.

Trump wanted the DOJ to appoint a special counsel for election fraud, set up a meeting with Rudy Giuliani, to potentially file a lawsuit in the Supreme Court, hold a press conference and to send letters to state legislatures furthering baseless claims of fraud.

"I will say that the Justice Department declined all of those requests that I was just referencing," Rosen said, "because we did not think that they were appropriate based on the facts and the law as we understood them."

The committee played a video of former Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann recalling what he said he told Jeffrey Clark, a lower-level DOJ official overseeing environmental law enforcement, who supported Trump's proposal to have him become acting attorney general to help overturn the election results.

"When he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said '[expletive], congratulations. You just admitted your first step you would take as AG would be committing a felony," Herschmann said. "'You're clearly the right candidate for this job.'"

"I told Clark the only thing he knew was that environmental and election both start with "e," and I'm not even sure you know that," he added.

In audio testimony, former deputy acting attorney general Richard Donoghue also recalled telling Clark, "Go back to your office, we'll call you when there's an oil spill," and calling the draft letter he wanted to send swing states to appoint alternate slates "a murder-suicide pact."

Rosen and Donoghue were detailing a two-and-half Oval Office meeting where Trump repeatedly pressed but was eventually dissuaded from his plan to install Clark atop the Justice Department to pursue baseless allegations of voter fraud just days before Congress was set to convene to certify Biden's victory.

Vice-chair Liz Cheney focused her opening statement Thursday on teasing a draft letter that Trump and former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark wanted the department to send to Georgia officials citing already disproven allegations of fraud.

"As you will see, this letter claims that the U.S. Department of Justice's investigations have 'identified significant concerns hat may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia,'" Cheney said. "In fact, Donald Trump knew this was a lie. The Department of Justice had already informed the president of the United States repeatedly that its investigations had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the 2020 election."

ABC News obtained and published the draft letter in full last year. Read it here.

Cheney also said the public today will see video testimony by three members of Trump's White House staff identifying certain members of Congress who contacted the White House after Jan. 6 to "seek presidential pardons for their conduct."